Hundreds feared dead in French Mayotte cyclone

What happened

Several hundred people are feared dead on Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, after Cyclone Chido slammed the archipelago over the weekend, Mayotte Prefect François-Xavier Bieuville said Sunday.

Chido, the strongest cyclone to hit Mayotte in nearly a century, also grazed nearby Madagascar and Comoros before making landfall in Mozambique, causing flash flooding and other damage.

Who said what

"I think there will certainly be several hundreds, maybe we will reach a thousand, even several thousands," of deaths, given the "violence of this event," Bieuville said on a local TV station. French President Emmanuel Macron said his "thoughts" were with "our compatriots in Mayotte."

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Mayotte, with a population of "just over 320,000," is "France's poorest island and the poorest territory in the European Union," The Associated Press said. But it has attracted tens of thousands of undocumented migrants, Reuters said, because it has a "higher standard of living" than Comoros "and access to the French welfare system."

What next?

French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau was due to travel to Mayotte today as officials scrambled to create an air and sea bridge from Réunion, another French island on the opposite side of Madagascar.